Ultrastable glasses portray similar behaviour to ordinary glasses at high pressure

Vapour deposited ultrastable glasses have gained much attention since its discovery in 2007 by the group of Mark Ediger. By physical vapour deposition, at proper deposition conditions, it is possible to obtain, in just few minutes, glasses with a thermodynamic stability that rivals the stability of glasses naturally aged for millions of years, i.e. ambers.

It was shown that the transformation of ultrastable and conventional (cooled from the liquid state) glasses seems to take place at a converging temperature value when the pressure is increased. In this study, we propose that a different compressibility factor of these two kind of glasses explains the experimental result.

This research was published in Scientific Reports as an open-access article, available here.